Matthew Quick — the former high school English teacher turned best-selling novelist whose 2008 book, “The Silver Linings Playbook,” was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie — had a well-guarded secret when he was a teenager.

Mr. Quick loved to read Hemingway, Dickens, Twain and Shakespeare and wanted to become a writer.

“Most of my friends didn’t read literature. My parents did not read literature. The community leaders where I lived didn’t read literature. And they certainly did not write,” Mr. Quick said. “It made me very odd and strange in my neighborhood. It made me feel like a freak.”

Mr. Quick made the confession at the 23rd Annual Betty Curtis Worcester County Young Writers’ Conference Saturday at St. John’s High School.

In his keynote address, Mr. Quick shared the fears, the frustration, the isolation and the uncertainty that come with wanting to be a writer and the hard work, persistence and support you need to succeed.

Obsessively writing away in his heavily guarded red notebook, Quick’s life opened up when he was introduced to Hemingway in the 11th grade.

“For the first time, I thought Hemingway was speaking a language that I understood intuitively, that resonated very strongly with me,” Mr. Quick said. “And it was a strange experience because no one else in my community was having that experience but me.”

When it came time to answer the big question, ‘What are you going to do the rest of your life?’ Mr. Quick told his bemused counselor: “Maybe I could be a writer like Ernest Hemingway.” The counselor said: “That’s a very good hobby for you, but you’ll probably never make a living doing it.”

Mr. Quick got angry, very angry at his guidance teacher’s response.

“Every adult that I know says you should do the thing that you love. They’re telling me that I live in the greatest country in the world and you have all types of opportunities,” he said. “And here I am saying the thing I want to do and the first thing that people say is, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ ”

In his senior year during English class, Mr. Quick had an epiphany about how he could get a job that would be really, really easy and give him a lot of time to write fiction. He could become a high school English teacher.

So Mr. Quick went to La Salle University in Philadelphia. Not only was college like a “coming out” for him, because he no longer had to hide his passion for writing and literature, but he met Alicia Bessette, also an aspiring novelist who would become his confidant, critic, unsung hero, life partner and wife.

For seven years, Mr. Quick was an English teacher in Haddonfield, N.J. During that time, he stopped writing altogether and was “functionally depressed” and trapped by a life he did not want.

“I would polish the bars of my prison,” Mr. Quick said. “Tenure at the best school in South Jersey, that’s a bar. I have health insurance. That’s a bar. I have a pension. That’s a bar. I have dental. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and we have to pay a mortgage. These were all the bars of my prison.”

Then his wife gave Mr. Quick a chance to break out of his self-imposed jail sentence and pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a writer, and he took it. The couple sold their home, liquidated all their assets, quit their respective jobs, did some traveling and then moved in with his wife’s in-laws in Holden.

Mr. Quick’s father called him an idiot.

And in the unfurnished basement of his in-laws, Mr. Quick, writing 12 to 14 hours a day, every day, in isolation, wrote several failed novels before coming up with the manuscript for “Clouds,” which would later be renamed “The Silver Linings Playbook.”

“When you say you want to write a novel when you’re 17, people think it’s cute,” Mr. Quick said. “When you’re 32 years old and you’re living with your in-laws, especially if you are a man in America and you’re not making any money, people make you feel like you’re committing a crime.”

Mr. Quick gave the “Clouds” manuscript to his wife to read, telling her that if she thought it was terrible, he would abandon his writing and go out and get a job.

Two days later, she told her husband, “This is a beautiful book. I think this is the one. I think you’re going to make it.”

After being rejected by more than 70 literary agents, “The Silver Linings Playbook” got published. The book was adapted into a film directed by David O. Russell, who also adapted the screenplay, and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress for the film, which has earned more than $100 million.

“If I wrote my story, an average kid from a blue-collar family makes it to the Oscars, people would say that’s the cheesiest Disney movie ever, ridiculously optimistic and over the top,” Mr. Quick said. “I have to do what’s authentically me, and I feel blessed that I have enough readers to keep doing it.”

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